Spacecake555

From Our World of Text Wiki

Spacecake555 has to redo this page. Everyone thinks I'm a retard but I'm really just special. I need protection for this page. Also Adelaide will eat and kill you in that order if you dislike fictional googology.

fine you get to have it
" Why isn’t googology (the study of large numbers) a recognized subfield of mathematics with its own journal?  There’s all these different ways of getting large numbers, and different mathematical questions that yield large numbers; and yet all those vast structures are comparable, being either greater, less, or the same.

The process of considering how to construct the largest possible computable numbers naturally yields the recursive ordinals and the concept of ordinal analysis.  All mathematical knowledge is in a sense contained in the Busy Beaver series of huge numbers.

You’d think there’d be more Math done on that, rather than there just being a recently-formed Googology Wikia.

Three hypotheses come to mind:

1)  The process of determining which two large numbers is larger, is usually just boring tedious legwork and doesn’t by itself produce new interesting insights.

2)  By Friedman’s Grand Conjecture, most proofs about numbers can be formalized in a system with an ordinal no greater than ω^3 (omega cubed).  Naturally arising huge numbers like Skewes’ Number or Graham’s Number are tiny and easily analyzed by googological standards.  Few natural math problems are intricate enough or recursive enough to produce large numbers that would be difficult to analyze.

3)  Nobody’s even thought of studying large numbers, or it seems like a ‘silly’ subject to mathematicians and hence is not taken seriously.  (This supposes Civilizational Incompetence.)

I would think (2) most likely rather than (3) in this case; someone like Conway, who invented the surreal numbers, would not have balked at… inventing Conway chained arrow notation, come to think, possibly as late as 1996 from what I’ve read, and that’s just up to ω^2.  Hm.  Maybe it is just Civilizational Incompetence and the googology wiki will blossom into a new field of math?  I honestly don’t know. "

-yudkowsky.tumblr.com